Michael Jones: Visions of sugar issues dancing in my head

Thursday

Apr 29, 2010 at 12:01 AMApr 29, 2010 at 7:30 AM

About a week ago I learned something I already knew. Isn’t that the way it usually goes about the things in life that truly matter? Before you really know something of importance for certain you usually have an intuition or feeling about whatever it is and how it will most likely affect you or your life, before you ever truly know what’s going to happen.

Michael Jones

About a week ago I learned something I already knew. Isn’t that the way it usually goes about the things in life that truly matter? Before you really know something of importance for certain you usually have an intuition or feeling about whatever it is and how it will most likely affect you or your life, before you ever truly know what’s going to happen.

This has happened to me only a few times in my life.

The first was when I turned the corner in the Tulsa airport and saw the woman who would eventually become my wife for the very first time; not knowing if this woman would be able to stand even being in the same room as me, I knew that I could stay with her forever if she were foolish enough to allow it. The second time was when my mother told me she had cancer just a few scant months after burying her husband. As soon as she told me I could hear the iron in her voice and knew that no cancer was going to take this woman before she was ready. The thought that she would die any time before her daughter walked down the aisle and graduated high school was preposterous.

It would never happen and it didn’t; she made cancer wait its turn.

Last week was the most recent such moment for me, and it was just a fleeting moment when I was sitting in the lobby of the emergency room just moments before I was scheduled to begin a glucose tolerance test to see whether or not I was diabetic. As I sat there I knew – just knew – that the results were going to be positive.

How could it be anything else as my sister, both parents and one grandparent were diabetic?

Until then though I had proudly hung on to the idea that I would be the exception to the rule, as I’d shown no signs of diabetes at all. Try as it might I just figured that this disease would never be able to get through my denial and I’d be safe.

Ironically, the thing that led me to see through this illusion and know that I was going to be diagnosed as diabetic was that I’ve been having some issues actually seeing clearly. It seems that shifts in blood sugar that go along with having diabetes can directly affect the shape of your eyes themselves and how they are able to properly focus.

So it’s official - I’m diabetic.

At the moment I’m not sure what that completely means or what it promises for the rest of my life. While I know that there are changes I need to make (and changes I have already made) in how I live my life I do not completely know how diabetes will affect me, as I grow older.
I’m hoping that if I am able to roll with this and work to control this disease that the long-term effects are minimal and won’t cause me to miss out on all those plans I have for being the cranky old man of the neighborhood.

You know the one! I’ve already been secretly practicing my “get off my lawn!” speech for when the neighbor’s children or grandchildren foolishly set foot on even one blade of my front yard.

Here’s to hoping that this moment is one more that I can eventually add to the times I’ve been able to diagnose what will happen way before it ever has a chance to prove me right or wrong. What I see this time is that the changes my family are taking to improve our health are what we needed to do and that these are the years we will look back on and give thanks for … these are the years that diabetes saved our lives.